Book: Interview with the Vampire
January 12th 2004 10:54 am
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.
I read this on recommendation of a friend, who has read them all and really liked them. We were sitting in a Tim Hortons on the way back from a fencing tournament, and the conversation turned to Heinrich Schliemann, Troy, and then to movies, fantasy novels, why the hell Robert Jordan can’t finish the Wheel of Time series already, and finally it landed on Anne Rice.
I was prepared to be open-minded, because the conversation we had about faith and immortality and the world was really interesting, but I can say I didn’t enjoy this book all that much. I found the narrative style to be kind of intrusive and disjointed, and I didn’t ever really feel connected to the characters. I have Louis’s view of his counterparts and his experiences, but to me he didn’t really tell me why he felt the way he felt or did the things he did.
I felt like I only had little pieces of the characters, and maybe that was the attraction this book had for my friends, that they could fill in all the missing pieces with imagination. Part of the problem was I had seen Queen of the Damned so that coloured my perceptions of Lestat, because I had seen him later. I haven’t seen the movie of Interview with the Vampire yet and I don’t know if I will.
So, all in all, a somewhat rewarding experiment, but I don’t know if I will read them all myself. It was much more entertaining to hear the stories told orally, to hear the enthusiasm for the tangled threads from my friends. Much more compelling, indeed.